The Ethics of Belief

The “ethics of belief” refers to a cluster of questions at
the intersection of epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, and
psychology.

The central question in the debate is whether there are norms of some
sort governing our habits of belief-formation, belief-maintenance, and
belief-relinquishment. Is it ever or always morally wrong (or
epistemically irrational, or practically imprudent)
to hold a belief on insufficient evidence? Is it ever or always
morally right (or epistemically rational, or
practically prudent) to believe on the basis of sufficient
evidence, or to withhold belief in the perceived absence of it? Is it
ever or always obligatory to seek out all available epistemic evidence
for a belief? Are there some ways of obtaining evidence that are
themselves immoral, irrational, imprudent?

Related questions have to do with the nature and structure of the
norms involved, if any, as well as the source of their authority. Are
they instrumental norms grounded in contingent ends that we set for
ourselves? Are they categorical norms grounded in ends set for us by
the very nature of our intellectual or moral capacities? Are there
other options? And what are the objects of evaluation in this
context—believers, beliefs, or both?

Finally, assuming that there are norms of some sort governing
belief-formation, what does that imply about the nature of belief?
Does it imply that belief-formation is voluntary or under our control?
If so, what sort of control is this? If not, then is talk of an
ethics of belief even coherent?

The locus classicus of the ethics of belief debate is,
unsurprisingly, the essay that christened it. “The Ethics of
Belief” was published in 1877 by Cambridge mathematician and
philosopher William Kingdon Clifford, in a journal called
Contemporary Review. At the outset of the essay, Clifford
defends the stringent principle that we are all always
obliged to have sufficient evidence for every one of our
beliefs. Indeed, the early sections of “The Ethics of
Belief” are so stern that William James would later characterize
Clifford as a “delicious enfant terrible” who
defends doxastic self-control “with somewhat too much of
robustious pathos in the voice” (1896, 8).

James's more permissive view—initially a commentary on Clifford
presented to the Philosophy Clubs of Yale and Brown, then published as
“The Will to Believe” in 1896—has become a kind of
companion piece, and together the two essays constitute the touchstone
for later discussions.

Clifford's essay is chiefly remembered for two things: a story and a
principle. The story is that of a shipowner who, once upon a time, was
inclined to sell tickets for a transatlantic voyage. It struck him
that his ship was rickety, and that its soundness might be in
question. Knowing that repairs would be costly and cause significant
delay, the shipowner managed to push these worries aside and form the
“sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was
thoroughly safe and seaworthy.” He sold the tickets, bade the
passengers farewell, and then quietly collected the insurance money
“when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales” (1877,
70).

According to Clifford (who himself once survived a shipwreck, and so
must have found this behavior particularly loathsome), the owner in
the story was “verily guilty of the death of those men,”
because even though he sincerely believed that the ship was sound,
“he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before
him.” Why did he have no such right? Because, says Clifford,
“he had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in
patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts” (1877, 70).
After making this diagnosis, Clifford changes the end of the story:
the ship doesn't meet a liquid demise, but rather arrives safe and
sound into New York harbor. Does the new outcome relieve the shipowner
of blame for his belief? “Not one jot,” Clifford declares:
he is equally guilty—equally blameworthy—for believing
something on insufficient evidence.

Clifford goes on to cite our intuitive indictments of the
shipowner—in both versions of the story—as grounds for his
famous principle:

(Clifford's Principle) “It is wrong always,
everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient
evidence.”

Despite the synchronic character of his famous Principle,
Clifford's view is not merely that we must be in a certain state at
the precise time at which we form a belief. Rather, the obligation
always and only to believe on sufficient evidence governs our
activities across time as well. With respect to most if not all of the
propositions we consider as candidates for belief, says Clifford, we
are obliged to go out and gather evidence, remain open to new
evidence, and consider the evidence offered by others. The
diachronic obligation here can be captured as follows:

(Clifford's Other Principle) “It is wrong
always, everywhere, and for anyone to ignore evidence that is relevant
to his beliefs, or to dismiss relevant evidence in a facile
way.” (Van Inwagen 1996, 145)

There might be at least two kinds of diachronic obligation here: one
governing how we form and hold beliefs over time, and the other
governing how we relinquish or revise beliefs over time. If someone
violates such a diachronic obligation by “purposely avoiding the
reading of books and the company of men who call in question”
his presuppositions, Clifford warns, then “the life of that man
is one long sin against mankind” (1877, 77).

Despite the robustious pathos, it is not clear in the end that
Clifford's considered position is as extreme as these two principles
make it sound. In the later part of his essay Clifford puts forward a
view about what it is for evidence to be “sufficient” that
suggests a more moderate stance. Still, the story about the shipowner
together with the sternly-worded Principles turned Clifford into the
iconic representative of a strict “Evidentialist” position
in the ethics of belief—the position, roughly, that we are
obliged to form beliefs always and only on the basis of sufficient
evidence that is in our possession. (For more on the notion of
“evidence” and the varieties of Evidentialism, see
§4-§5 below).

James's Non-Evidentialist alternative to Clifford is far more
permissive: it says that there are some contexts in which it is fine
to form a belief even though we don't have sufficient
evidence for it, and even though we know that we don't. In fact, James
and many of his “pragmatist” followers claim that
sometimes we are positively obliged to form beliefs on
insufficient evidence, and that it would be a significant prudential,
intellectual, or even moral failure to do otherwise. “Our
passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option
between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by
its nature be decided on intellectual grounds” (1896, 11).

As permissive as this sounds, however, James is by no means writing a
blank doxastic check. In “The Will to Believe” he lays out
a series of strict conditions under which an “option”
counts as “genuine” and believing without sufficient
evidence is permitted or required. For instance, the option must be
between “live” hypotheses—i.e. hypotheses that are
“among the mind's possibilities” (thus, belief in the
ancient Greek gods is not a live option for us these days). There must
also be no compelling evidence one way or the other, the option must
be “forced” such that doing nothing also amounts to making
a choice, and the option must concern a “momentous” issue.
In the absence of those conditions, James reverts happily to a broadly
Evidentialist picture (see Gale 1980, 1999, Kasser and Shah 2006, and
Aikin 2014). (For more on the varieties of Non-Evidentialism, see
§6 below).

The phrase may be of 19th-century coinage, but there were
obviously ethics of belief well before Clifford and James. Descartes
says in the Meditations that when forming a judgment,
“it is clear by the natural light that perception of the
intellect should always precede (praecedere semper debere)
the determination of the will” (1641, 7:60). In the context of a
search for certain knowledge (scientia), Descartes maintains,
we have the obligation to withhold assent from all propositions whose
truth we do not clearly and distinctly perceive (clear and distinct
perceptions themselves, by contrast, will produce belief ineluctably).
In other contexts, it may be both permissible and prudent to form a
mere “opinion” (opinio) whose truth we do not
clearly and distinctly perceive. Even then, however, we are obliged to
have some sort of evidence before giving our assent. Thus
Descartes advises Elizabeth that “though we cannot have certain
demonstrations of everything, still we must take sides, and in matters
of custom embrace the opinions that seem the most probable,
so that we may never be irresolute when we need to act” (1645,
4:295, my emphasis).

Locke's ethics of belief is at least as strict: in the search for
scientific knowledge as well as in all matters of “maximal
concernment,” Locke says, it is to “transgress against our
own light” either to believe on insufficient evidence, or to
fail to proportion our degree of belief to the strength of the
evidence. In his discussion of “Faith” in the Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, Locke famously moralizes:

He that believes without having any Reason for believing, may be in
love with his own Fancies; but neither seeks Truth as he ought, nor
pays the Obedience due to his Maker, who would have him use those
discerning Faculties he has given him, to keep him out of Mistake and
Errour. (1690, 687)

To form a belief about important matters without possessing sufficient
evidence—or to believe anything with a degree of firmness that
is not proportioned to the strength of our evidence—is to misuse
our faculties and court all manner of error. It is also, for Locke, to
contravene the will of our “Maker.” Given his divine
command theory of ethical rightness, it thus appears that such
behavior will be morally as well as epistemically wrong.

By contrast, Blaise Pascal and Immanuel Kant anticipated James by
emphasizing that there are some very important issues regarding which
we do not and cannot have sufficient evidence one way or the other,
but which deserve our firm assent (on practical grounds) nonetheless.
(For more on Pascal and Kant on Non-Evidentialism, see §6.1
below).

This last point makes it clear that there may be different types of
norms governing practices of belief-formation, and that these will
correspond to different types of value. The ethicist of belief will
thus need to specify the type of value she is invoking, why and how
she thinks it can ground doxastic norms, whether it is the only kind
of value that does that, and (if not) what the priority relations are
between norms based in different kinds of value.

Clifford and Locke, as we have seen, claim that the issue of whether
we have done our doxastic best is an epistemic one and also
(given a few further premises) a moral one. James, on the
other hand, focuses on the important role played by
prudential value in the ethics of belief, saying in one
passage that Clifford's Principle not only puts us at “risk of
losing the truth” and thus of violating an epistemic norm, but
that it articulates an “insane logic”—an
“absurdity” that guarantees prudential disaster (1896,
25). The general idea is that if something is beneficial, and
believing that p will help us achieve, acquire, or actualize
that thing, then it is prima facie prudent for us to believe
that p. This will be true even if we lack sufficient evidence
for the belief that p, and even if we are aware of that
lack.

Consider for example someone who reads in the psychological literature
that people are much more likely to survive a cancer diagnosis if they
firmly believe that they will survive it. Upon being diagnosed with
the disease himself, and in light of the fact that his goal is to
survive, it will be prudent for this person to believe that he will
survive, even if he knows that he (and his doctors) lack sufficient
evidence for that belief. James refers to such cases as ones
“where faith in a fact can help create the fact” (1896,
25).

Someone might suggest that the patient's knowledge that his
“faith helps create the fact” itself counts as a
kind of evidence in its favor. If this is right, then the case would
not be in tension with Clifford's Principle after all. But other cases
can be used to make the same point: Pascal famously argues that it is
required by prudential rationality that we believe in God,
even though we lack sufficient evidence for that belief, and even
though such belief would play no role in “creating” the
fact that it describes (Pascal 1670).

Here’s a non-religious example: suppose that you would like to
retain a good relationship with your teenage son, and you are aware
that this requires believing the best of him whenever possible. You
also have some moderate but not compelling olfactory evidence that he
is using drugs in the house when you are away (in response to your
queries, he claims that he has recently taken up transcendental
meditation, and that the funny smell when you come home is just
incense). Suppose too that you know yourself well enough to know that
your relationship with your son will be seriously damaged if you come
to view him as a habitual drug-user. This suggests that you would
violate a prudential norm if you go ahead and believe that he is. In
other words, it is prudent, given your ends, to withhold belief about
the source of the aroma altogether, or even to believe, if possible,
that he is not smoking pot but rather burning incense in your absence.

On the other hand, if you regard the occasional use of recreational
drugs as harmless fun that expresses a healthy contempt for
overweening state authority (in some states, at least), then it might
be prudent for you—confronted with the telltale odor—to
form the belief that your son has indeed taken up the habit in
question. Either way, the recommendation here aims at a kind of
prudential or pragmatic value, and not at the truth per se.
(For some recent arguments in favor of prudential evidence for belief,
see Reisner 2008 and 2009; for arguments against, see Adler 2002 and
Shah 2006).

In addition to being sorted according to the type of value
involved, doxastic obligations can be sorted according to their
structure. The main distinction here is between
hypothetical and categorical structure.

Prudential norms usually have a hypothetical structure: if
you have prudential reason to survive the disease, and if
believing that you are going to do so will help you achieve this end,
then you have a prima facie obligation to believe that you
are going to survive. Likewise, if you want to protect your
relationship with your son, and if believing that he is
deceiving you and taking drugs will damage your ability to trust him,
then you are prima facie obliged to withhold that belief.

Put more generally: if you have a prudential end E, and
belief that p is likely to make E obtain, then you
have a prima facie obligation to believe that p. The
obligation will be particularly powerful (though still prima
facie) if E cannot be achieved other than through belief
that p, and if you are (or should be) aware of that fact.
(For more on hypothetical norms generally, see Broome 1999 and
Schroeder 2005)

The structure of moral and epistemic norms can also be construed
hypothetically in this way. The ends in question will presumably be
doing the morally right thing or promoting the moral
good, on the one hand, and acquiring significant
knowledge or minimizing significant false belief, on the
other (see Foley 1987). Achieving these ends clearly does involve an
increase in well-being on most conceptions of the latter.

However, because these ends are putatively set for us not by a
contingent act of will but rather by our nature as morally engaged,
knowledge-seeking beings, some philosophers regard them as
categorical rather than instrumental imperatives. In other
words, they take these norms to say not merely that if we
want to achieve various hypothetical ends, then we have the
prima facie obligation to believe in such-and-such ways.
Rather, the norms say that we do have these ends as a matter
of natural or moral necessity, and thus that we prima facie
ought to believe in such-and-such ways.

Note, however, that the most general prudential end—something
like surviving, say—may be thought to have an equal
claim to the title of a “necessary” end: it is set for us
by our nature as living members of a species that has evolved through
natural selection. And so by the same logic it might be taken to
underwrite a categorical—albeit still prudential—norm of
belief, especially in life-or-death cases such as that of the cancer
diagnosis above.

So far the norms involved in the ethics of belief have been
characterized without attention to reflective access requirements. A
reflective access requirement has to do with the
subject’s own reflective awareness of some of the relevant
facts.

In order to see how such requirements can play a role, consider the
following prudential doxastic norm:

(A) If S has end E, and if S's believing
that p is likely to make E obtain, then S has a
prima facie prudential obligation to believe that p.

This is a purely objective or ‘unreflective’ account of
the prudential obligation in question: it is simply concerned with
whether the subject in fact has a certain end and whether
in fact the belief that p is likely to lead to the
accomplishment of that end. If (A) were the right way to articulate
obligations in the ethics of belief, then we would have far more
prima facie doxastic obligations than we realize.

Reflective or ‘subjective’ components can be added to
norms in order to make the results more plausible:

(B) If S knows that she has an end
E, and if S knows that believing that p is
likely to make E obtain, then S has a prima facie
prudential obligation to believe that p.

(B) is towards the top of the scale in terms of reflective access
requirements: S has to know that he has E and that believing
that p is likely to make E obtain . As a sufficient
condition for having a doxastic obligation, it may be acceptable, but
most ethicists of belief will not want to make the reflective
knowledge necessary in order for there to be genuine
prima facie prudential obligations.

Intermediate positions would replace “knows” in one or
both parts of the antecedent of (B) with something weaker: “is
in a position to know,” “justifiably believes,”
“is justified in believing,”, believes, and so on.

Note that an ethicist of belief who wants to include a reflective
access requirement in a doxastic norm would need to do so in a way
that doesn't generate an infinite regress. Note too that the norms we
considered above govern the positive formation of belief. An
account of the plausible conditions of reflective access may be
somewhat different for norms of maintaining, suspending, and
relinquishing belief (for suspending, see Tang 2015 and Perin
2015).

Another closely-related debate has to do with the types of value that
can generate doxastic norms and obligations. Value monists in the
ethics of belief argue that only one type of value (usually some kind
of epistemic value) can generate such norms. A prominent kind of
monism, often called “veritism”, says that truth is the
fundamental doxastic good: its value is not grounded in knowledge or
anything else (see Pritchard 2011, Gardiner 2012, Ahlstrom-Vij
2013).

Other more permissive accounts go beyond the three types of value
considered above—prudential, moral, and epistemic—to
suggest that there are other types that can generate doxastic
obligations as well. Perhaps there are aesthetic norms that
guide us to beliefs that have some sort of aesthetic merit, or that
make us qua subjects more beautiful in virtue of believing them. There
may also be social norms that govern beliefs we form in our
various communal roles (as lawyers, priests, psychiatrists, friends,
parents, etc. (regarding the doxastic obligations of friends, see
Keller 2004, Stroud 2006, and Aikin 2008)) and political
norms that govern beliefs we form as citizens, subjects, voters, and
so on (here see the second half of Matheson and Vitz 2014).

It's an interesting and open question whether such aesthetic, social,
or political norms could be cashed out in terms of epistemic, moral,
and prudential norms (e.g. perhaps being someone's lawyer or being
someone's friend underwrites certain moral or
prudential norms of belief regarding his or her innocence).
In any case, the three types of underlying value considered above are
the ones most frequently discussed under the rubric of the
“ethics of belief.”

Norms, and types of norms, can be related in different ways. According
to the interpretation of Clifford presented above, there is a strong
connection between the epistemic and the moral types: the fact that
there is an epistemic norm to believe always and only on sufficient
evidence entails that there is an analogous moral norm. The
reasoning here seems to be as follows:

(P1) We have an epistemic obligation to possess
sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs;

(P2) We have a moral obligation to uphold our
epistemic obligations;

(C) Thus, we have a moral obligation to possess
sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs.

This formulation keeps the types of values distinct while still
forging a link between them in the form of (P2). But of course we
would need to find a sound sub-argument in favor of (P2) (see
Dougherty 2014).

In some places, Clifford seems simply to presume that epistemic duty
is a species of ethical duty. That would make sense of why he thinks
it just obvious that the shipowner is “equally
guilty”—regardless of whether the ship sinks. Elsewhere
Clifford defends (P2) by reference to our need to rely on the
testimony of others in order to avoid significant harm and advance
scientific progress. No belief is without effect, he claims: at the
very least, believing on insufficient evidence (even with respect to
an apparently very insignificant issue) is liable to lead to the
lowering of epistemic standards in other more important contexts too.
And that could, in turn, have bad moral consequences.

Elsewhere still Clifford seems not to recognize a distinction between
epistemic and moral obligations at all (see Van Inwagen 1996, Haack
1997, Wood 2002, and Zamulinski 2002 for further discussion of
Clifford on this issue).

It was noted earlier that one way to read Locke is as arguing for (P2)
via the independent theoretical premise that God's will for us is that
we follow Evidentialist norms, together with a divine command theory
of moral rightness (see Wolterstorff 1996). But Locke can also be read
as primarily interested in defending (P1) rather than (P2) or (C) (see
Brandt Bolton 2009).

A virtue-theoretic approach, by contrast, might defend (P2) by
claiming not that a particular unjustified belief causes moral harm,
but rather that regularly ignoring our epistemic obligations is a bad
intellectual habit, and that having a bad intellectual habits is a way
of having a bad moral character (Zagzebski 1996, Roberts and Wood
2007).

In addition to using theoretical arguments like these, ethicists of
belief can connect doxastic norms by appealing to empirical data. If
we discover through investigation that it is on the whole prudent to
be morally good, then prudential norms may be able support some of the
moral norms. Similarly, if we discover that following moral norms of
belief reliably leads to the acquisition of knowledge, then there may
be a track-record argument that goes from epistemic norms to moral
norms (this would effectively be an empirical argument in support of
(P2) above). And if we empirically find that adhering to epistemic
norms also promotes the moral good, then there will be an argument
from the moral to the epistemic.

Finally, norms and types of norms can be in outright tension. The
prudential norm recommending belief that your son is not smoking pot
when you're gone conflicts with the epistemic norm to follow your
perceptual evidence. Likewise, the moral norm to believe the best of
others is often tragically in tension with the epistemic norm to
believe what the evidence supports, with the prudential norm to
believe whatever it takes in order to get ahead, and so on.

Tension or conflict can also exist between doxastic obligations of a
diachronic sort. The epistemic norm to gather as much evidence as
possible may conflict with the prudential norm to believe in such a
way as to save time and effort (example: the fastidious boss who never
hires anyone until he has investigated a candidate's entire past,
called every reference, and confirmed every qualification). It also
conflicts with the moral norm not to believe on the basis of evidence
gathered in an immoral fashion (example: the doctor who gathers
evidence about human diseases by performing inhumane experiments on
prisoners).

Ethicists of belief who are not value monists often claim that there
is a way of ordering norms or types of norms in terms of the relative
strength or relative ease with which their claims on us can be
defeated. This means that in a given situation there will be a
determinate answer about what one ought to believe “all things
considered.” Others argue, however, that at least some of the
norms are incommensurable, and that in many cases there will simply be
no answer to the question of what it is right to believe all things
considered (Feldman 2000). Still others think that one category of
norm collapses into another and that this can give us an all things
considered conclusion (for discussion of whether epistemic rationality
collapses into prudential rationality, for example, see Kelly
2003)

In sum: a full-blown ethics of belief will say something about the
axiological sources of the different types of norms, about the
inferential relations between them, about their temporal range
(synchronic/diachronic) and about what to do when norms conflict. (See
Broome 1999 and Kolodny 2005)

Questions about what
belief
is and how it is formed have typically played a marginal role in the
ethics of belief debate. There is agreement among most analytic
philosophers that belief is (roughly) a dispositional, affirmative
attitude towards a proposition or state of affairs. To believe that
p is to take it that p is true—to take it that
the state of affairs described by the sentence
“p” obtains. Note that this doesn't mean that the
subject explicitly believes the proposition that p is true,
however, since the latter is a different and higher order belief (mere
belief that p doesn't require possession of the concept of
“truth”, for instance, whereas the belief that p is
true does). It is also widely agreed that the majority of our
beliefs are not occurrent at any given time, and that belief comes in
degrees of strength, confidence, or firmness.

After this, however, agreement breaks down. Representationalists
regard beliefs as structures in the mind that represent the
propositions they affirm—usually in something like a mental
language (see Fodor 1975 and the entry on
language of thought).
Behavioralist-dispositionalists regard beliefs as dispositions to
act in certain ways in certain circumstances (see Braithwaite
1932–1933). Eliminativists regard talk of “beliefs”
as designating convenient fictions that we ascribe to people in folk
psychology (see Churchland 1981 and the entry on
eliminative materialism).
Primitivists think of beliefs as basic mental states which do not
admit of analysis. And so on. There is also a big controversy
regarding whether the most fundamental concept here is of degrees of
belief (or credences).

This disagreement about the nature of belief has (thus far at least)
not been taken to impinge on the ethics of belief debate in
significant ways. Of course, eliminativists and behavioralists will
have to say that doxastic norms—if there are any—apply at
bottom to non-doxastic states. Still, modulo those kinds of changes,
these and other ontological analyses of belief seem compatible with
many different accounts of its ethics.

By contrast, theories about the aim or goal of
belief typically have an immediate and substantive impact on
conceptions of its ethics, and can be used, in particular, to answer
questions about the relative importance of various norms, whether
there are “all things considered” obligations in a given
situation, and so on (see Velleman 2000, Wedgwood 2002,
Steglich-Peterson 2009, and the essays in Chan 2013 for general
discussion; see Côté-Bouchard forthcoming for a critique
of the move from aim of belief to doxastic norm).

A few philosophers and psychologists argue that simply acquiring
significant truth while avoiding significant
falsehood is the only aim of belief, and thus that any doxastic
obligations will be structured accordingly (see David 2001). Others
argue that there are important aims in addition to, or even in lieu
of, the aim of truth-acquisition—aims that can underwrite other
doxastic norms (Velleman 2000, Sosa 2000, Sosa 2003, Gibbons 2013). A
common candidate here, of course, is knowledge itself (see Williamson
2000, Pritchard 2007, Simion et al. 2016 and the entry on the
value of knowledge),
but some authors claim that justification (Adler 2002, Gibbons 2013)
and/or doxastic “virtue” is the aim (Zagzebski 2004, Sosa
2011, Wright 2014), while still others plump for a more structurally
complex aim such as “understanding” (Kvanvig 2003, Kvanvig
2009, Grimm 2012). (Note, though, that other authors argue that
understanding doesn’t even involve belief (Hunter 1998;
Dellsén forthcoming)).

As mentioned earlier, in cognitive science and evolutionary biology,
it is often assumed that the aim of belief (as well as of almost every
other process) is something like “survival.” There are
ongoing disagreements, however, about the extent to which that is
correct and, even if it is, whether it is necessarily or even
contingently connected to the aim of truth-acquisition (Stich 1990,
Plantinga 2002, Street 2006).

A very different kind of candidate for the aim of belief would be
something like pleasure broadly-speaking, or perhaps
“feeling at home in the world.” If one of these is the
aim, then the norms it underwrites might at times lead away
from truth. For example: suppose Smith is the sort of guy who feels
great pleasure when he believes that everyone he knows thinks highly
of him, and pleasure is an aim that underwrites a doxastic norm. Then
Smith has a prima facie obligation to believe that his friend
Jones thinks the world of him.

This is clearly one of the places where debates about psychological
strategies such as self-deception, “bad faith,”
wish-fulfillment, “irony,” and the like become germane in
the ethics of belief (see Wisdo 1991, Wisdo 1993, Mele 2001, Wood
2002, and the entry on
self deception).
If the aims of belief can plausibly be regarded as wide
enough to include truth-neutral states such as pleasure or
“feeling at home in the world,” and if these aims can
underwrite genuine norms, then Evidentialism as characterized below
clearly delivers a far-too-narrow characterization of its ethics.

We have seen that our conception of the aim of belief can influence
our conception of doxastic norms. But it can also affect the extent to
which parallels can be drawn between the ethics of belief and the
ethics of action generally. If one adopts “value monism”
in the ethics of belief (whether it be veritism of some other
kind of value), then there will be a strong parallel to monistic
consequentialist theories in the ethics of action (DePaul 2001).

A remaining difference between consequentialism in epistemology and in
ethics, however, is that a belief’s success at achieving its aim
is typically evaluated by epistemologists all at once in the moment it
is formed, whereas in the case of an action, subsequent consequences
are relevant to the evaluation of its moral rightness, and many of
these consequences won’t be known (if at all) until much later
(for an extended comparison of these two kinds of consequentialism,
see Briesen 2017). That said, it is possible to imagine a diachronic
ethics of belief according to which truth is the sole aim of belief,
but we evaluate particular beliefs not just on whether they are true
but also on their ability to enable or produce the subsequent
acquisition of other true beliefs.

If we have a theory according to which the aim of belief is complex,
however, then parallels to the ethics of action become more
complicated. An ethicist of belief who holds that acquiring
significant truth in the right way is the aim of belief, and
analyzes the “rightness” of a belief-forming practice in
terms of its ability to lead to truth, may find that the relevant
parallel is to rule-consequentialism. By contrast, the view that the
aim of belief is simply to believe in the right way,
regardless of whether that “right way” reliably leads to
signficant truth, looks like the analogue of a deontological position
in ethics that emphasizes the intentional following of right
principles rather than the achievement of some aim external to the act
itself. Whether or not these parallels are illuminating, and whether a
view in the ethics of belief constrains our options in the ethics of
action, is still an open question (see Kornblith 1983, Dougherty
2014).

There are many other variations here. It seems possible to defend the
view, for instance, that we ought only to believe on sufficient
evidence—as the Evidentialists teach—but that our
conception of the aims of belief might provide further and more
determinate necessary conditions for permissible belief. It is also
possible to argue that the aim of belief makes it the case that we
have practical reasons for thinking that only epistemic
reasons can license belief (Whiting 2014).

Finally, it may be possible to defend the view that belief by its
nature has no specific aim, but is rather a state that can
constitute or lead to any number of different goods. If that is right,
then we obviously cannot look to the aim of belief to underwrite an
account of its ethics.

We have already seen that some theorists take knowledge to be the (or
at least an) aim of belief. Some philosophers go further and say that
knowledge is also the norm of belief - that is, that any
belief that does not also count as knowledge is impermissible or
irrational or vicious or defective. Put another way: knowing that p is
both a necessary and a sufficient condition for permissibly
(rationally, virtuously) believing that p.

One argument for the claim that knowledge is the norm of belief seeks
to infer that result from the claim that knowledge is the aim of
belief. The aim generates the norm, and any belief that fails to
achieve the aim also fails to obey the norm. Perhaps the most
prominent argument along these lines starts with the related claim
that knowledge is the “norm of assertion ”—i.e.,
that we ought not assert a proposition if we don’t know it (see
Williamson 2000). But if that’s the case, and if belief is the
“inner” analogue of assertion, then it looks as though we
also ought only to believe a proposition when the belief counts as
knowledge. The debate then has to do with whether knowledge really is
the norm of assertion, and, if so, whether “belief” is an
inner analogue of assertion in such a way that the norm carries over
(see Sutton 2005, Huemer 2007b, Bach 2008, Goldberg 2009).

One reason that this position can seem counterintuitive is that an
important role that norms often play is that of guiding action. The
principle that we should only believe what we know is not a very
helpful action-guiding norm, since we often don’t know what we
know (according to most epistemologists, at least). Of course, if I
adopt this norm, and know that I don’t know that p,
then I’ll see that I shouldn’t believe that p either (this
negative formulation is what Williamson uses in 2000, 256). But,
again, most epistemologists do not think we are typically able to
tell, from the inside, whether we would know the proposition in
question if we believed it. And yet that ability seems to be
presupposed by the idea that this is an action-guiding norm. Another
objection to the idea that knowledge is the norm of belief is more
intuitive: knowledge seems to most of us like a different sort of
accomplishment than belief, or even justified belief, or (after
Gettier) even justified true belief. It is one thing to say that we
acquire the concept of belief by looking at paradigm cases of
knowledge and then subtracting different elements from them (for
instance: “justified belief would be just like knowledge but
without truth”). It is quite another to say that no belief can
count as properly formed unless it also counts as knowledge (for more
on all this, see Benton, Other Internet Resources)

A third foundational issue related to the nature of belief has to do
with whether or not belief-formation is in some way voluntary or under
the control of the will. This issue, too, has an effect on the ethics
of belief. Many philosophers and psychologists have concluded that
belief is a more or less involuntary response to perceived evidence.
But if a behavior isn't ‘up to us’ in any important sense,
then it is hard to see how we could be responsible for performing it
(see Alston 1989 for an influential argument along these lines).

In response to this “doxastic involuntarist” challenge ,
some philosophers argue that we do have direct control over at least
some of our beliefs (Ginet 2001, Weatherson 2008), or that we at least
have control over which beliefs are suspended or relinquished (Rott
forthcoming). Others develop a kind of hybrid view that allows certain
kinds of belief-formation to count as free and ‘up to us,’
even if they are also caused in us (see Steup 2000, Ryan 2003). Some
explicitly reject any parallel between free will and free belief
(Wagner forthcoming). Still others focus on the fact that we can be
praised and blamed for beliefs (as well as actions) that are not under
our control, even if there are no obligations on belief-formation.
(Adams 1985, Hieronymi 2006, Southwood and Chuard 2009).

Yet another response, compatible with many of those list above,
involves an account of indirect ways in which
belief-formation counts as voluntary and thus susceptible to normative
evaluation (e.g., Pascal 1670, Feldman 2000, Audi 2001, Yee 2002, Leon
2002, Audi 2008b). Another option is to take the doxastic
involuntarist challenge to motivate a new focus on positive
propositional attitudes that are by definition voluntary
– “acceptances,” for instance (see Cohen 1992,
Bratman 1992, Engel 2000, Audi 2008a, and §7 below). Finally,
some ethicists of belief seek to argue that there are some
obligations on direct belief-formation while also absorbing the
putative empirical datum that much of it is not under the control of
the will (see Feldman and Conee 1985, Feldman 2000, Adler 2005,
Hieronymi 2006 and 2008).

Evidentialism of some sort is far and away the dominant ethic of
belief among early modern and contemporary philosophers alike. The
central principle, as mentioned earlier, is that one ought only to
base one's beliefs on relevant evidence (i.e. evidence that bears on
the truth of the proposition) that is in one's possession. Many
Evidentialists (Locke, Hume, and Clifford, for example) add the
condition that the amount of evidence in one's possession must be
proportioned to one's degree of belief, and that one should only
firmly believe on the basis of “sufficient”
evidence (where “sufficient” involves the evidence being
strong enough for the belief to count as knowledge if true). Some also
add one of the reflective access requirements mentioned above: for
instance, that we ought to know (or being a position to know, or
justifiably believe, or be justified in believing) that we have
evidence for the original belief or even that the amount of evidence
we have is sufficient (for a survey of these positions and their
critics, see the essays in Dougherty 2011).

Once a principle along these lines has been chosen, the relative
strictness of a given Evidentialist position will be a function of how
many exceptions it allows. The strictest sort of
Evidentialist—Clifford, at least on standard readings—says
that the principle holds “always, everywhere, and for
anyone” (though note, again, that Clifford himself qualifies
this later in his essay). There are problems with such a strict
position, however, including the threat of the infinite regress that
arises if the strict Evidentialist also requires that we
believe that we have sufficient evidence for all of our
beliefs.

In contrast, moderate Evidentialists take their principles to be
exceptionable; thus they allow that there are some circumstances in
which subjects are rationally permitted to form beliefs in the absence
of sufficient evidence. They might hold that the Cliffordian view
applies, say, to the beliefs formed by a military pilot about the
location of a legitimate bombing target in the midst of a residential
area, or the beliefs formed by a government health official regarding
the efficacy of a pharmaceutical trial, at least insofar as these
beliefs lead to morally or prudentially significant actions. But at
the same time they might think it permissible to abandon these strict
standards in ordinary contexts where not much is at stake—for
instance, the everyday belief that there is still some milk in the
fridge. If the number of exceptions is very large, then the position
ends up looking more like one of the Non-Evidentialist positions
described below. As a result, the boundary between a very moderate
Evidentialism and full-blown Non-Evidentialism can be quite
blurry.

As difficult as it is to defend strict or thoroughgoing Evidentialism,
it is even harder to defend the view that Evidentialism is
inappropriate in every domain. The cases of the pilot and the
health official are ones in which the subject's beliefs (largely as a
result of the actions to which they lead) simply must, we think, meet
some very high standards of evidence. Accordingly, at least some sort
of moderate or context-specific Evidentialism seems overwhelmingly
plausible.

We have seen that the distinction between strict Evidentialism and
moderate Evidentialism is quite sharp but that the line between
moderate Evidentialism and Non-Evidentialism is rather blurry. Perhaps
the best place to make a distinction between moderate Evidentialism
and full-blown Non-Evidentialism is over whether a subject can be not
only permitted but also obliged to form a belief on
insufficient evidence (or, depending on the reflective access
conditions, on what she takes to be insufficient evidence) in certain
situations. An ethicist of belief who affirms this, it seems
reasonable to say, has thereby abandoned even the most moderate form
of Evidentialism and moved into the Non-Evidentialist camp (see
§6 below).

It was noted earlier that doxastic norms can be either synchronic or
diachronic. Clifford's Principle itself is articulated as a synchronic
norm, but in the later portions of the “Ethics of Belief,”
he is more concerned to articulate diachronic principles regarding
evidence-collection and evidence-assessment. It is from these portions
of his discussion that we get “Clifford's Other
Principle.”

Many early ethicists of belief modeled their accounts on deontological
ethical theories that tend to formulate principles synchronically.
Recently, however, virtue epistemologists have emphasized what they
take to be the diachronic character of our fundamental doxastic
obligations, and suggest that synchronic principles requiring
sufficient evidence for a belief at a time are plausibly viewed as
underwritten by more fundamental diachronic principles enjoining the
cultivation of virtuous intellectual character (Zagzebski 1996,
Roberts and Wood 2007, Sosa 2007, Audi 2008b).

Crucial to any theory in the ethics of belief—and especially an
Evidentialist theory—will be some account of the nature of
evidence itself. Some philosophers construe evidence in terms
of demonstrative proof, others in terms of objective and/or subjective
probability, and others simply in terms of anything that belief is
responsive to (see the entry on
evidence).
A fully articulate Evidentialism will also provide an account of how
evidence supports belief (see the entry on the
epistemic basing relation),
and of what it is to have or possess such
evidence.

It will also, perhaps, say something about whether there can be
evidence (arguments) in favor of having a belief that p or
bringing about the belief that p, in addition to evidence in
favor of p itself (see Reisner 2008). It will presumably also
have something to say about disagreement between epistemic peers, and
the impact that such disagreement can have on our conception of the
doxastic norms, especially if the disagreement is not based on a
difference in evidence (van Inwagen 1996, Kelly 2005). Finally, it
might take a stand on the more general issue of how higher-order
evidence interacts with first-order evidence. For example: in the case
of peer disagreement, knowing that a peer disagrees with you is a
piece of higher-order evidence regarding your first-order belief.

With respect to reflective access conditions, it was noted earlier
that Evidentialists cannot require that a rational subject
always base beliefs on sufficient evidence that she knows or
justifiably believes she has, for fear of an infinite regress. If that
is correct, then another less demanding sort of principle must be in
the offing, one according to which at least some beliefs can simply be
held on the basis of sufficient evidence, regardless of whether the
subject has any beliefs about that evidence.

On the issue of evidence-possession generally: if we regard evidence
as wholly constituted by mental states (experiences, beliefs,
memories, etc.), then an account of what it is to
“possess” evidence will be relatively
straightforward—we must simply have these mental states. If
evidence is not merely in the head, so to speak, then the possession
condition in Evidentialist norms may turn out to be quite complex.
What is our evidence for the belief that “it's raining”?
Is it our awareness or experience of something, such as the street's
being wet? Or is it simply the street's being wet? When asked why we
believe that it is raining, we typically say something like
“because the street is wet.” Is this merely shorthand or
does it say something about the nature of evidence? (For arguments
that extra-mental facts in the world often constitute evidence, see
McDowell 1994 and Ginsborg 2007; for further discussion see Williamson
2000 and Dancy 2000, ch.6).

In light of the fact that there are different types of value
underwriting different types of obligation, there must also be
different types of Evidentialism: prudential, epistemic, and moral at
the very least.

Strict prudential Evidentialism doesn't enjoy much of a
following; indeed, as with most strict forms of Evidentialism, it is
hard to see how it could be motivated. Perhaps it is prudent in
general to follow one's evidence, but there will always be cases
in which prudential considerations push in the direction of playing
fast and loose with the evidence. Wouldn't it be better for the
grief-stricken widower to believe that his wife is enjoying life in
heaven, or for the devoted spouse to fight off the belief that her
husband is unfaithful, even though she regularly finds lipstick on his
collar?

One move that the prudential Evidentialist can make in response to
such objections is to adopt the doxastic analogue of rule
consequentialism. Even if there are particular cases in which it is
imprudent to follow one's evidence, the general rule that one
should believe on the basis of, and in proportion to, sufficient
evidence in one's possession produces the best distribution of
prudential outcomes overall.

This kind of moderate prudential Evidentialism can handle a lot of
common counterexamples, but there is still the concern that entire
classes of beliefs—rather than individual
instances—violate the principle and yet seem to produce more
beneficial overall results. For instance, wouldn't it be better all
around if each of us were as a rule to think more highly of
one another's worth, intentions, and capacities than our evidence
actually supports?

In response, it might be claimed that the source of the prudential
value of always believing on sufficient evidence is that it tends to
result in our having knowledge. If that were right, then there would
be a clear connection between prudential and epistemic norms (see
§2.4 above and §5.3 below). The challenge for such a
position, however, is to show that justification or knowledge adds
something of genuine prudential value that mere true belief
lacks.

Strict moral Evidentialism is unlikely to be attractive to anyone but
the most zealous Cliffordian. In its more moderate forms, however,
moral Evidentialism is much more attractive and widespread. “You
simply shouldn't believe that about your
friend!”—expressed in a context where the friend's
disloyalty is not conclusively supported by the evidence—sounds
to many ears like the expression of a plausible moral obligation (see
Wood 2002, ch. 1–3).

Moral rightness and wrongness is analyzed in many different ways, of
course; a moral Evidentialist will presumably either adopt one of
those analyses and develop her position accordingly, or show that the
ethics of belief swings free of debates between deontologists,
consequentialists, virtue theorists, and the like. No matter which
theory of moral rightness and wrongness she adopts, however, there
will be the usual questions to settle about whether there are
thresholds of harm beyond which Evidentialist principles are
suspended, even in a deontological context, about whether the
fundamental objects of moral appraisal in the doxastic context are
acts or rules, and about whether there is a ‘unity’ to the
moral as well as the intellectual virtues. Again, it is an open and
interesting question whether these issues need to be dealt with
differently in an ethics of belief than they are in an ethics of
action.

By far the most influential and widespread variety of Evidentialism is
epistemic (see Chisholm 1957, Adler 2002, Conee and Feldman 2004, Shah
2006). The central thesis of epistemic Evidentialism is that the norms
of evidence governing belief are somehow based in the nature and aims
of theoretical reason itself. To believe on insufficient evidence is
at bottom an epistemic failure—a failure to use our
cognitive faculties in such a way that we are likely to acquire
significant knowledge and avoid significant unjustified belief. Some
philosophers in this tradition also defend Locke's proportionality
thesis according to which our degree of belief must be in proportion
to the strength of our evidence (see White 2005).

A major challenge facing proponents of epistemic Evidentialism is to
find an adequate motivation for it: if there are not sufficient
prudential or moral grounds for the obligation to believe on
sufficient evidence, then what is the source of its normativity? In
response to the challenge, epistemic Evidentialists take a number of
different tacks. Some argue that the norms are underwritten by
necessary, conceptual truths. On this view, the very concept
of belief reveals that it is a truth-aimed attitude that is only
properly formed on the basis of sufficient evidence in the possession
of the subject. Thus an attitude that is not formed in this way is
either not a genuine belief at all, or at best a deficient instance of
it (see Adler 2002, Textor 2004).

Other epistemic Evidentialists argue that doxastic norms arise not
from analysis of the concept of belief, but rather from reflection on
the fact that our belief-forming faculties are simply set up to be
sensitive to evidence. The faculties of perception, memory, testimony,
introspection, reasoning, and so on, typically generate beliefs on the
basis of sufficient evidence, and we usually regard these faculties as
malfunctioning, maladjusted, or misused when they generate beliefs in
other ways. Pieces of apparent evidence—epistemic reasons,
broadly-speaking—reliably provide us with important information
about the world, and we have evolved to be sensitive to such reasons
in our quest to survive and flourish.

Note that the epistemic Evidentialist does not hold that the
acquisition of significant truth—even truth that promotes
survival—is the only relevant consideration in this region: our
belief-forming faculties are not mere thermometers or
motion-detectors. The idea is rather that, as evidence-sensitive
believers, we don't merely want to believe significant
truths; rather, we want to have good grounds for taking propositions
to be true, and to base our belief on those grounds (Feldman 2000;
though again see David 2001). This putative fact is then taken to
underwrite a norm: we ought to seek not just true belief but
knowledge, or, more specifically, we ought to seek
widespread significant knowledge without widespread significant
error. To seek knowledge in this way is, among other things, to
seek to have sufficient evidence for true beliefs and to base them on
that evidence.

Another kind of defense of epistemic Evidentialism says that the
central Evidentialist principle—that we ought to believe on the
basis of sufficient evidence that is in our possession—is not an
analytic truth drawn from the concept of belief, and not a
‘functional norm’ arising from reflection on the way our
faculties are set up or designed, but rather a synthetic principle
that we simply rationally intuit in the course of reflecting on
concepts and thought-experiments. This approach seems coherent and in
some ways attractive, though it has not found many defenders in the
literature.

We have already seen that there are any number of ways in which one
can fail to be a strict Evidentialist. One might hold, for instance,
that belief need not always be based on evidence (though of
course the moderate Evidentialist could agree with that), or that
belief requires evidence but its degree needn't be
proportioned to the strength of the evidence, or that belief
requires evidence but need not be based on that evidence, or
that belief requires that there be evidence even if the
subject doesn't possess that evidence. No doubt there are
other ways as well, and the question of whether a particular
philosopher counts as an Evidentialist will ultimately hang on how
Evidentialism itself is construed.

Most important for present purposes, however, is to note that the fact
that someone is not a prudential Evidentialist, say, does not
entail that she is a Non-Evidentialist for prudential
reasons—or for any other reasons. Indeed, she might still be an
Evidentialist, but for moral or epistemic rather than prudential
reasons. As I will use the term, being a Non-Evidentialist
with respect to a certain domain of beliefs requires, as a necessary
condition, that one is not an Evidentialist of any sort about that
domain of beliefs.

I suggested earlier that a natural place to draw the line between
moderate Evidentialists and Non-Evidentialists about a domain of
beliefs rests on the question of whether belief on the basis of
insufficient evidence is ever reasonably required. Are we
ever obliged to believe, even in the absence of sufficient evidence?
Strict and moderate Evidentialists will say no, Non-Evidentialists
will say yes. Naturally, the reasons that motivate this putative
requirement will be different according to different types of
Non-Evidentialism. Here the focus will be on the three main types of
Non-Evidentialism that are prevalent among contemporary philosophers:
Practical Non-Evidentialism (which includes what is sometimes called
“pragmatism”), Conservativism, and Fideism.

As noted above, William James famously sniffs at the impracticable
stringency of Clifford's Principle, advocating instead the more
liberal policy that we sometimes have the “right to
believe” even when we lack sufficient evidence (and even when we
know that we lack it). In places, James goes further and
suggests that in certain cases—especially cases involving
religious and moral belief—it is not merely permitted but
positively commendable or even required that we
believe on insufficient evidence.

When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to
concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both
practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we
shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and
wait—acting of course meanwhile more or less as if
religion were not true—till doomsday, or till such time
as our intellect and sense working together may have raked in evidence
enough,—this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever
manufactured in the philosophic cave. (1896, 11)

We saw earlier that there are difficult conceptual and psychological
problems facing an ethics of belief that says, quite strictly, that we
must always and only believe what is prudentially beneficial. Thus
while pragmatism is sometimes characterized casually as the view that
we should believe whatever “works,” most self-described
pragmatists are very careful to specify the conditions under which a
subject can reasonably depart from, ignore, or go beyond her evidence
(see
pragmatism).
These conditions typically involve the absence of really compelling
evidence; thus, as James reminds his reader, pragmatic belief is not
simply wild-eyed believing “what you know ain't true”
(1896, 29). Pragmatists also typically require the existence of some
sort of exigency or “passional” interest on the part of
the subject that makes suspension of belief in that context impossible
(or at least exceedingly ill-advised). We saw earlier how James
defines a “genuine option” in an effort to specify these
conditions.

The emphasis on the “primacy of the practical” in James
was clearly anticipated by earlier ethicists of belief. Blaise Pascal
famously argues in the Pensées that wager-like
reasoning should lead us to set the goal of believing in God; thus his
focus tends to be less on the moral or epistemic and more on the
prudential motives for belief (Pascal 1670, Hájek 2003, Jordan
2006; see also the entries on
Pascal,
Pascal's Wager, and
pragmatic arguments and belief in God).
For Immanuel Kant, by contrast, considerations that can justify
belief (or faith) in the absence of sufficient theoretical evidence
are typically (though not exclusively) moral. If, for
instance, there is no sufficient evidence one way or the other for a
certain proposition p (the proposition, say, that the human
will is incompatibilistically free), and if one has set a moral end
that requires one to take a stand on the truth of p, and if
any evidence that one does have points in the direction of the truth
of p, then one is permitted (and sometimes even required) to
take p to be true. This ‘taking-to-be-true’
(German: ‘Fürwahrhalten’) is thereby
justified on “moral” rather than “theoretical”
grounds, and it counts as “belief” (Glaube) or
“acceptance” (Annehmung) rather than
“knowledge” (Wissen) (Kant 1781/1787, Chignell
2007).

A convenient label that captures both broadly pragmatist and broadly
Kantian theories is Practical Non-Evidentialism, where the
pragmatic/prudential and the moral are the two main species of
“practical” value (for more on moral reasons for belief
and whether they count as evidence see Pace 2010; for a survey of the
debate about pragmatic reasons for belief see Reisner 2017).

Conservatism (sometimes also called dogmatism,
though the latter is usually thought to be a view about perceptual
belief in particular; see Pryor 2000, White 2006) is the view that one
is prima facie justified in believing that p if in
fact one does believe that p (Harman 1986, Owens 2000).
Another version of it says that one is prima facie justified
in believing that p if it seems to one that p is
true (Huemer 2007a) or at least perceptually seems to one
that p is true (Pryor 2000). In order to be all things
considered justified on either of these conservatisms, one must be
aware of no undefeated defeaters for p. But the absence of
undefeated defeaters for p, even if one is aware of it, is
not positive evidence forp, and any
“impulsional” urge towards p or seeming that
p is true is not the kind of evidence that Evidentialists
think we should seek (see Conee and Feldman 2004, ch. 3; for
impulsional evidence see Plantinga 1993, 192). So on at least most
accounts of what “evidence” is, conservatism is an
important kind of Non-Evidentialism according to which some justified
beliefs—the immediately justified ones—are not based on
sufficient evidence.

Conservatism is regarded by some philosophers as a useful tool against
skepticism (Christensen 1994, Huemer 2007a), and its
“dogmatic” flavor is sometimes made more palatable by
combining it with various moderate or localized Evidentialisms. Thus,
for example, conservatism about beliefs that go into the foundation of
our knowledge structure (including beliefs about basic mathematical or
moral truths) might very naturally be combined with a kind of
Evidentialism about beliefs that are not in the foundation (for more
on foundationalism in epistemology, see
foundationalist theories of epistemic justification).

Note that conservatives need not say that any of the beliefs we have
are infallible or incapable of being undermined. Indeed, they might be
quite open to the fallibilist thought that our current justified
beliefs can be defeated (either rebutted or undercut) by new evidence.
So the view doesn't promote belief that is “dogmatic” or
“conservative”in some disparaging sense: it says merely
that some beliefs that we have, or some “impelling”
beliefs, needn't be based on positive evidential (or practical)
support in order to be justified (Harman 1986, Lycan 1988, Chisholm
1989, McGrath 2007).

A third Non-Evidentialist position in the ethics of belief, similar to
but distinct from dogmatism, is sometimes called fideism,
though it needn't have anything to do with religious doctrine in
particular. According to the fideist, we can legitimately hold
propositions on faith without having any evidence for them,
without feeling impelled towards them, and even in the face of strong
evidence against them (note that this is just one way of defining
“fideism,” see the entry on
fideism
for others). Someone might hold on the basis of faith, for instance,
that there has been at least one bodily resurrection at some point in
the past, even though he has never witnessed such a thing first-hand,
and his best scientific, testimonial, and everyday inductive evidence
constitutes a powerful case against it.

Fideism of this radical sort is not itself required by most religions,
but is typically associated with religious thinkers like Tertullian in
the ancient period (perhaps unfairly: see Sider 1980), and Kierkegaard
(1846) in the modern (also perhaps unfairly: see Evans 1998). Apart
from wearing its irrationality on its sleeve, fideism is vulnerable to
psychological objections about the lack of direct control over belief.
If belief just is an attitude that necessarily responds to
perceived evidence with a positive ‘direction of fit,’ it
is hard to see how a well-functioning subject could believe that
p in the face of strong evidence that not-p.
Consider someone who has normal sensory faculties and who, despite
strong perceptual and testimonial evidence to the contrary, repeatedly
declares—without claiming to have any hidden evidence—that
there is, say, a huge abyss opening up in front of him. It would take
a very long time for us to become convinced that he really
believes that there is an abyss in front of him. But if, in the end,
we are convinced by his actions and speech that he has this belief,
and we know that his sensory faculties are functioning properly, then
we will probably think the belief is the product of an undesirable and
partly involuntary state such as self-deception, wish-fulfillment, or
paranoia. We won't think that he has simply chosen to believe.

A more moderate sort of fideism would say that we are permitted to
form a “faith”-based belief only if the evidence regarding
the proposition in question is not compelling either way, or is absent
altogether. Only under those circumstances can we (directly or
indirectly) make a “leap of faith” into belief (Adams
1987). Typically, however, those who have recommended “leaps of
faith” have cited pragmatic or moral grounds for those leaps,
and so given the taxonomy we have so far, they would ultimately count
as practical non-Evidentialists rather than bona fide fideists.

If, on the other hand, the claim is that in the complete absence of
practical or theoretical reasons in favor, a subject is still
permitted to adopt a certain belief, then the view seems to have
abandoned aspirations to developing a principled position, and is no
longer obviously an “ethics” of belief. This is not a
knockdown argument against that kind of fideism, of course: it may be
that such a fideist can give reasons to think that trying to formulate
an ethics of belief is an ill-conceived project in the first
place.

A final alternative for the fideist is to admit that he is not really
focused on belief at all, but is rather trying to make room for
another kind of positive propositional attitude that is not guided by
evidence. Many philosophers and religious people who embrace the
fideist label construe “faith” (Latin: fides) as
something different from belief—hope, perhaps, or something like
“acceptance” (see §7 and the entry on
fideism).
On such a conception, faith that p might very well be able
rationally to co-exist in the same psychology with a lot of evidence
for not-p.

This last point shows that Evidentialism about belief—even of a
strict and uncompromising sort—can be combined with
Non-Evidentialism about some other positive, categorical propositional
attitudes in order to make it seem less stern (see Audi 2008a for a
list of possible meanings of “faith”). Perhaps the most
prominent candidate here is acceptance conceived as a
positive categorical attitude towards a proposition that is by
definition voluntary and figures significantly in our deliberation,
action, argumentation, and assertion. Some philosophers focus on the
role that acceptance plays in scientific inquiry, theory-construction,
and decision theory (van Fraasen 1984, Stalnaker 1987, Cohen 1992).
Others focus on the role that it plays in ethical, juridical,
religious, and everyday contexts (Bratman 1992, Cohen 1992, Alston
1996, Audi 2008a). A warning is in order here: acceptance is typically
a technical notion and characterizations of its nature and ethics
differ radically in the literature. There is also some dispute about
whether acceptance is able to play the various roles that its
advocates intend (Radford 1990, Maher 1990, Moore 1994).

The ethicist of belief who wants to soften or supplement her view by
appealing to some notion of permissible acceptance would need to say
what acceptance is, how the two sorts of attitude differ, what sorts
of norms govern each, and how they interact in a single subject. One
of the main advantages of a hybrid view like this is that acceptance
is usually taken to be by definition voluntary, and thus it
is much easier to see how a genuine “ethics” (complete
with praise and blame ascriptions) could be built around it. As we saw
earlier, a notion of acceptance (as “faith”) is the sort
of thing that a fideist might want to appeal to against those who say
that one can't just decide to believe that p in the face of
strong opposing evidence. A moderate fideist, by contrast, might argue
that we are only permitted to accept that p if we lack
strong evidence about p either way. This is still
consistent with our having weak evidence for not-p,
and even a (weakly held) belief that not-p.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Marian David and Avishai Margalit for
discussion, and Robert Audi, Anthony Booth, Rik Peels, Lu Teng, Nico
Silins, and René van Woudenberg for helpful comments on earlier
drafts. He also thanks Noam Weinreich for his help with updating the
2016 version of the entry and generating the bibliography.

He also thanks Cambridge University Press for permission to re-use a
few paragraphs from his portion of the essay “The Ethics of
Religious Belief: A Recent History,” in (Dole and Chignell
2005).